Hi Ivy,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 2: I have 2 or 3 emerging interests but am unsure how to figure out which one to pursue .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were benevolence, achievement, and hedonism.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was extraversion.
You said your top three talents were social, analytic, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get a job .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Finish studying for midterms .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said I’ll feel relieved!! .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Procrastination .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I finish meeting Thursday, then I must study for finance .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Art .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Embarrassed when receiving critical feedback, and Embarrassed when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being exam .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to .
In one word, you said it made you feel .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Success is about the journey |
| Boredom is an emotional like all other emotions |
| Effort improves achievement over talent over time |
| being aligned with goals is the opposite of being conflicted |
| Positive thinking isn't enough, you must think about obstacles and plan around it |
| Deliberate practice needs full focus |
| Without effort talent is just unmet potential ! |
| Whether you believe you can or can't you're right! |
| Willpower is not everything |
| Demanding and supportive mentors are not mutually exclusive |
| It's important to keep some tension to live a good life. Too much leisure = existential vacuum |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Farheen Shamdasani |
| Ivy, if you fold this up into a paper airplane (even metaphorically, in the likelihood that you are reading this on a screen), I will be anything but upset. I have wholeheartedly enjoyed getting to know you this semester. From your frisbee shenanigans, to your role as high school president, and every good deed in between, your stories never failed to make us laugh. At the same time, you listened to everyone’s stories so attentively. In so many ways, I think you brought our team together. I admire your ability to open up so easily, and how nonchalantly you approach building connections. Ritz has always told me how easy you are to get along with, and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to experience that myself.
I enjoyed hearing about your exploration of starting a fashion brand. It was a refreshing pivot from your initial idea on cryptocurrency (though please teach me about it if you get around to it), and I thought it was a really cool art-adjacent idea. I would love to hear more about the conversations that you had, I’m sure Stacey Bendet had great insights to share. You should definitely consider actually pursuing this project. Based on your F1 outfits, I have no doubt that this brand would be a disruptor in the industry! |
| Isobel Glass |
| Dear Ivy,
Where do I even begin! Well first off, I feel so grateful to have been in our infamous Grit Lab group with you. You are so genuinely yourself and bring the best energy to class every single week. You always made our discussion conversations 10x more lively and I appreciate how you make people feel so welcomed. You went out of your way consistently to include everyone and have brought some awesome stories to our classes! You are absolutely awesome and I am really going to miss not having Grit Lab with you next semester - but I also know that wherever you end up you will shine.
In terms of your Discovery Project on Fashion Branding, I really appreciated how you put so much emphasis on speaking with the experts and having curiosity conversations. I also loved how you pursued a passion that you had felt you weren’t fully able to explore within your academic study. Your own artwork that you showed in your presentation was beautiful! It was fascinating to hear a bit about how Alice and Olivia came to be and you did a good job of segmenting this experience into answering your burning question. Amazing job and I am excited to see what you do with this passion in the future.
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| Jules Bach |
| Ivy has been an indispensable member of our group, truly known for her meticulous attention to detail and exceptional creativity. Her ability to catch subtle nuances has greatly improved the quality of our discussions, while her innovative thinking has brought fresh perspectives and solutions to our different tasks along the class.
In her discovery project, Ivy's creativity was particularly striking, showcasing a side of her that was remarkably different from her other interests. The project was a testament to her versatile talents and her ability to think outside the box. It was fascinating to see her apply her creative skills in a domain that was distinct from her usual areas of expertise, demonstrating her adaptability and broad range of capabilities. I wish you the best in your artistic endeavors!
Thank you Ivy!
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.